For Techxx we developed an Outlook plug-in for archiving Outlook emails (including attachments) to a SharePoint document library and created workflows within SharePoint to send and archive emails with attachments directly from a document library into MOSS 2007. This way all information related to several projects/activities is accessible for all involved users, making it easier to track and manage.

The TechXX project included the development of 2 new features which allowed the customer to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 207) as a document management system:

1. Archive an e-mail message from Outlook in a SharePoint document library (including attachments).
2. Send an e-mail message from and directly archive it to a SharePoint document library.

The Standard version of MOSS 2007 in combination with Microsoft Outlook does not supply the user a friendly way to use e-mail functionality such as archiving messages from Outlook to a document library or sending and archiving e-mail directly from a document library in MOSS 2007. These e-mail functionalities proved to be needed in order to setup a complete (project) file with documents and e-mail messages in MOSS 2007. Often, a lot of important information is transferred by e-mail. This information is more useful when archived in a shared file/folder for follow-up or for historical analysis. All relevant e-mail messages (along with attachments - word, pdf, excel, jpg) should be found in this shared file/folder in MOSS 2007 instead of leaving them in personal mail boxes with no access to other users.

Both EN and NL language had to be supported and the application had to run on Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007, Windows XP or Windows Vista. Therefore, complete tests were prepared and performed for various environments, in which the applications proved to be stable.

The project proved to be very interesting, allowing us to improve the knowledge about Outlook-SharePoint integration and SharePoint workflows. One of the big challenges was implementing validation for all SharePoint property types on the client side, as well as retrieving all document libraries' settings in order to replicate in Outlook their SharePoint functionality (user rights, multi content types, versioning control).